Africa-trip 2010/2011, Les chutes de Gouina

Les Chutes de Gouina

Gouina is a place left over by the russians in 1960. You have to imagine three buildings turning up all of a sudden in the middle of nowhere. There is not much more left than just the walls of the buildings. The roof, the windows, the doors and all the interial installation disapeared over the years. And now since not even three weeks some french people took over the place. The plan is to turn the place into some sort of tousist attraction. They involve the people from the nearby villages.The money is coming out of their own pocket. At the end of the day they want to have a place where some tourists are able to hire a bed for the night, have some food or cold drinks or hire a local guide to visit the waterfalls. What they did so far was cleaning out two of the buildings, built a sort of bar, tables and beds. They still do have a lot of work in front of them. When everything is finished they want the local people to run this place in autonomy. The place itself is at a very nice spot. The sound of the waterfalls is always in the background and the river is very near-by. The water is very clean and not too cold. They use the water for cooking and even for drinking after it´s filtered. After we arrived on the spot we said hello to everybody and than had a look at the waterfalls. They are beautiful. We found a nice place close to the river to park the car for the night. In the morning we haqd another look at the place. We met Mairie the french woman again and Clemont who is the leader of the group. Everybody seemed to be very busy. I spotted a guy who was loading rocks to build a wall on a pick up. I just went over there and gave him a hand. It was so funny, the same time he was giving driving lessons to a local bloke. The car was an old Tata who one of the guys drove down from France. They will leave the car with the locals as a transport. But for sure first they had to teach them how to drive a car. I was just standing there and watching him. I figured it must still be a long way to the finish. The guy didn´t even know it which direction to turn the steering wheel. When he wanted to go left he turned the wheel to the right. But it was not the first time he sat at the wheel. He was stalling the car all the time and by starting it he always forgot to push down the clutch. Like I said we were on this field collecting rocks and the guy was driving. There were only small rocks and one bigger one on the whole field and guess.....,yes, the guy drove just over the big rock and ripped the exhaust pipe off.

No problem, they just took the exhaust off completly and went on without it. Another one was trying to drive an old Mercedes van, he was heading straight for a tree and instead of steering either to the left or to the right he just went head on into the tree. For us this looks all very amazing, but for someone who never had contact to a car it must be normal. Later we saw some shuffles and some guys cleaning out one of the buildings, we joint them for a couple of hours. Someone told us they went to see some hippos a little bit up the river. Wow, hippos, we had to see them. The next moring we got up early and went 2-3km up the river. Like usual whereever you go there is someone on a bicycle or by foot, one of them was telling us a spot to go to. We made our way through the thicket at the bank and started to wait. After just maybe 10min. I spotted something in the water. I was asking Lena if this is a rock or maybe not. It was a hippo 5 meters in front of us. Unfortunatly it was diving off. Later we spotted three of them in quite a distance. We left for a better place. After a while we found another good place and we waited for more or less one hour when we first heard some hippos close to our right. It was two of them. They made noises like a whale when they release air. Sometimes they were grunting like pics.

What an experience, watch the pictures. Great, later we learned we were the only ones who spotted hippos that close. But it is not only hippos to be seen. Arround our camping place we had monkeys and all sorts of very multicoloured birds. In the evening we were invited for dinner with the other guys. Finally we were getting to know the guys a little bit better. Three of them were from Quebec in Canada. They speak french with a very funny accent. The rest of them were all french. Later all of a sudden someone placed a bottle of Absinth on the table. They bought it on their travells trough Spain. Voilá, my first glass of Absinth. What a drink. I thought my throat is on fire and at night I had some really strange dreams. The next day was a day just to relax. Manuel one of the french guys was asking me if we want to join him the next morning to cut some palm-trees on an island in the river. Yeah, why not we thought. So the next morning we left very early. It is not easy to get to this island. First we took the Tata and drove 7km to the next village. No, actually there was a village before where we picked up two guys. Than we had to take a boat. The boat had the size of a canoe and was self made. They said the wood it is made of is not from the area. The first thing we had to do was drawing water. These boats are not sealed. There were two paddles and I took one to paddle to the island. It took us maybe 8-10 min to get to the island. On the island is another village. One the village people joined us. He knew which palm-trees we had to cut. For sure we didn´t cot the female trees, they are carrying the fruits, but the male ones for them are useless. It was a 15 min. walk and it was already getting warm, especially when you are carrying a rucksack and a chainsaw. I had my own chainsaw with me. In the next 3 hours we were cutting 16 palm-trees. They want to use the palm-trees for the roof construction of the buildings. After cutting and walking across country for three hours I was exhausted. It was almost impossible to work longer than until noon. It was getting too hot. We made our way back to the village where we´ve got clean, fresh water and some peanuts. You know, just fresh water can be so delicious. After our refreshments we were paddling back to the main land. We went passing by at a shop and we bought some papayas. The biggest and sweetest I have ever seen for 30cents a peace, fresh from the tree. Back at Gouina we were offered a nice meal and the rest of the day was to relaxe. The heat and the sun takes all the energy. For the locals it is still winter, sure, it is the coldest time of the year, whatever cold means when the scale reaches 35°C. But the fact is one of them had a down-jacket on the whole day and was not even swetting. The next day I decided to join them again. Lena was staying in the camp. Same routine, but this time we had 12 people in and on the Tata. I don´t know how often we were hitting the ground. The fact is we left too late in the morning. It was already boiling hot when we got to the island. Than we couldn´t find the trees. At the end we found them and the locals started to split them. They had a technique to do this.

They used chisel which they made out of building steel old drive shafts and so on. Anyway, these chisels they place each in a distance of maybe 30-40cm and split up the trunk. Clemont and me we thought we slit each trunk into four pieces but the locals said we should split in into 16pieces. So we had this discussion going on. At the end they were splitting one trunk into 8pieces. We made a test by standing on one of the pieces with 7people and it seemed to be very solid. The rest of the trunk which is still 6-8meters to the crown is useless. So we were thinking what we could do with it and at the end we were cutting some „chairs“ and „stools“. The looked nice but it might be a transporation problem cause they might be too heavy. Back at Gouina it was relaxing time and at the evening we had some sort of a party going on. The night and the next day was terrible. Both of us were sick. I reckon we had bad food. We just had a lost day. Lena spent the whole day dozing underneeth a tree and I was just reading and sleeping the whole day. Just the thought about food made us sick again. Iwan a mexican guy who turned up the day before was giving us some pills. We wanted to leave this day but in the condition we have been it was not possible. The next morning the world looked different. Still a little bit dizzy bot more or less ok. We said good-bye to the people and were heading off to Kayes.

The link underneeth will lead you to picassa photostream.

http://picasaweb.google.com/106213480355655195189/AfricaTrip20102011LesChutesDeGouina#